What is erasure?

Erasure is a form of poetry created by erasing words from an existing text and framing the result on the page as a poem. The poems in I Am Not Famous Anymore are sourced from interviews with Shia LaBeouf published in Rolling Stone, Dazed, GQ, The Guardian, The New York Times, Playboy, and Cosmo Girl, among other publications.

Advance Praise for I Am Not Famous Anymore

When at its best, the art of the erasure is not the simple removal of language, but the work of finding the threads resting underneath what already exists. In I Am Not Famous Anymore, Erin Dorney is both puzzle-maker and puzzle-solver, chipping away at Shia LaBeouf and making something newer, and more glistening. What will most stun you is the arrangement of language that was already there: “I was folded / I was made to hold things / and on the way home / he cut me.” This book is so immersive and so transformative in its ambition that one will forget that they are reading the words someone else once spoke into the air. And I suppose that is the trick, isn’t it? To make a reader care about that which they didn’t care about before. This book left me invested in ways I didn’t imagine. And that is the highest compliment I can pay.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

I Am Not Famous Anymore is strange and surreal while simultaneously being tragic and hilarious. Perfect.

— Chelsea Martin, author of Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life

Creating poetry via erasure is a balancing act, requiring the author to balance forces of voice, subject and style against those of the original text. In I Am Not Famous Anymore, Erin Dorney achieves a rare equilibrium, surfacing poems that are at once recognizable to those of us familiar with entertainment news and uniquely her own. The book acts a fulcrum on which Dorney deftly balances the celebrity against the plebeian, the body against its interior life, and our public presentations against our private selves. In doing so, she admirably demonstrates how we can both lie in the bed we made for ourselves while aspiring to something beyond.

— Jenni B. Baker, co-founder of Container

Erin Dorney’s I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE is a blue-ribbon lesson in how to do celebrity studies.

— Lara Mimosa Montes, author of The Somnambulist

In I Am Not Famous Anymore, which shares a title with Shia LaBeouf’s own performance piece, the actor’s musings are distilled and repurposed through poet Erin Dorney’s own aesthetic lens. As LaBeouf’s meta-modern sensibilities have rendered him tabloid fodder at times, one imagines he’d appreciate Dorney’s nuanced, ironic, and moving interventions. Here, the private becomes public becomes private becomes public again, culminating in the “fifth iteration / of a chance to believe.”

I read each of these poems at least twice, once purely on its own poetic terms and once again through the voice of Shia, curious after the original context, what Erin cut, just generally what Shia is doing now. And many of them I kept reading, going back and forth between these two readings, kind of hypnotized by them, by Shia, by what Erin has done to make each feel like a unique little puzzlebox of a poem.